


preposterous / yet achingly tender

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Catholic Character, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Music, Wine
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:48:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 8,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27676274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: Drabbles and ficlets: glimpses of one possible path for the Preston-Flynn duo, after they've helped to save the world.
Relationships: Garcia Flynn/Lucy Preston
Comments: 20
Kudos: 40





	1. Plus-One

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from the absolutely breathtaking poem "The White Campion," by Donald Revell.

The winter quarter has come to a close, and Stanford’s history department is observing it in time-honored fashion. There are children running around and befriending each other and trying to steal cookies without parental oversight. Faculty spouses — generally down-to-earth, by way of counterbalancing their partners — are commiserating with each other or being introduced around. (The scholar of early modern Tudor politics has married a fireman; people are cooing over the wedding photos.) The department members themselves are cheerfully complaining about their grading or the entirely unwarranted comments of Reviewer 2 or the latest grant application.

And then there is a half-lull in the conversation, a moment of shock akin to alarm. The man in the doorway is an alien and arresting presence. The department secretary and the graduate students exchange anxious glances — _does he have the right room? who is this_? Surreptitiously the assembled company watches him claim two glasses from the buffet table without breaking stride, and drift up behind one of the department’s junior members, who appears entirely unfazed by this man materializing in order to hand her champagne. 

“Hi,” says Lucy. “Elaine — ” turning to the historian of colonial Philadelphia — “this is my partner.”

“Garcia.” The smile is unexpected, another piece of data to be filed by the busily whirring academic brains, and Elaine is slightly nonplussed. 

“So how did you two meet?” By this point, most conversations have resumed; several knots of people are trying not to look as though they’re eavesdropping. This innocuous question triggers a duel of glances. It is very hard to glare at a man of Flynn’s height from a distance of mere inches, but Lucy attempts it. 

“Actually,” says Flynn, something wicked sparkling in his eyes, “we met in a bar.”

“It’s not like it sounds…”

“And,” he continues serenely, “I thought she was the most astonishing thing I had ever seen.”

“I — that’s not — you did not — ” Lucy appears to be having trouble catching her breath.

“And… that was that?” manages Elaine.

“Oh no,” says Lucy hastily. “He took me on a number of very bad dates.” Her partner makes an offended noise. “We went to the fair,” she says, half-pouting at him, “and we didn’t even ride the Ferris wheel!”

“But you did get to volunteer with a magician!”

“True.” Lucy adds, brightly: “And I did manage to leave you in handcuffs.” The scholar of social movements in 20th-century Italy chokes on her canapé, and it is at this juncture that the entire room learns that Lucy Preston is capable of making her terrifying murder husband blush to the roots of his hair.

“The jazz club,” he suggests, slightly hoarsely, “was not a bad date.”

“It was not a bad date,” concedes Lucy.

“I expect she’s more strict in her expectations with students,” says Flynn, and proceeds to ask Elaine about her research, concerning which he’s surprisingly well-informed. They stay to the end of the party; when they get in the car, Lucy is just tipsy enough on free champagne that he reaches across to do her seatbelt.

“I think,” says Lucy, considering, “that you’ve seduced half my tenure committee and convinced the other half that you’d willingly murder them in their beds.”

“Well,” says Flynn smoothly, putting the key in the ignition, “as long as it’s the correct half.” At that, Lucy begins to laugh. Her fits of giggles last most of the way home. Then they go to bed… and she laughs again.


	2. possible futures

The sky is an implausibly perfect California blue. Fitful rain, smoke and smog might be only bad dreams, with the coastline living up to the postcards that slowly curl and bleach on racks. Lucy Preston kicks off her shoes and stretches her feet luxuriously, her legs propped in front of her on a bench. She has an iced coffee, a pile of essays on Elizabeth Drinker’s diary, and an indulgent partner with a comfortable shoulder. Life is good.

She is woken from a half-doze over a B-minus paper by an indistinct shouting, and a repositioning of the shoulder she’s been leaning on. 

“Mmm whazzit?” Grumbling towards full consciousness, she sits up. Garcia doesn’t react — and this in itself is unusual. Blinking, Lucy follows his gaze. Of the three boys with the soccer ball, two of them might be brothers; then again, they might just be inseparable, in the way that children of that age often are. Home from school, to one’s house or the other or out into the street… She glances at her partner’s profile again. His jaw is set, his expression dark. For someone else, she thinks, it might be inscrutable; but not for her. Lucy sighs, and shoves her stack of papers untidily into her satchel. They’ll keep.

“Garcia.” Barely a flicker. “Flynn.” That gets him. He snaps around to face her, gives her a sudden, shaken smile. His eyes are still distant, lost, and she aches with love for him. “Garcia Flynn,” she says, “do you want children?” 

His jaw drops just a little; there is a moment’s frozen silence; and then he closes his eyes. She wonders what he is afraid of her seeing there: desire? fear? hope? She watches him moisten his lips. Still he does not speak.

“Yes or no question, genius,” says Lucy softly. 

“Yes.” The word emerges hoarse and half-choked. “Yes.” When he opens his eyes, all she can see in them is sorrow.

Lucy decides that she does not care what the adolescent skaters and the earnest joggers and the children and the dog-walkers think of them. Anchoring herself on the bench — lest he get any funny ideas about standing up — she moves to straddle his lap, one knee on either side of his thighs. “There,” says Lucy. “Now.” He gazes at her with enormous pupils. She rests her fingertips against his cheekbones, begins to try to smooth the tension out of his jaw. Then she leans forward, and kisses him — kisses him steadily and tenderly, until she can feel his mouth melt under hers.

“There,” she says again, when she draws back. “That’s better.”

“Lucy…”

“What?” She can see, as well as feel, the quickening of his breath. “You needn’t look at me as though I’ve made you an indecent proposal.” His arms go around her waist, and he buries his head in the crook of her neck. She lets herself toy with his hair, allowed to grow slightly longer now that they’re no longer in danger of finding themselves in the era of Brilliantine at a moment’s notice.

“Hostages to fortune,” says Flynn into her collarbone. “Francis Bacon.”

“Mm.” Lucy hums quietly against the crown of his head. “I’d understand if you didn’t want that. Again.” A quiet, ordinary night; an almost-ordinary sound; three shattered lives. It makes her pulse race to think of it, and they aren’t her memories, or her family. It wasn’t her child. “But if you do,” continues Lucy, “if _we_ do…” His arms tighten around her. 

“I can’t make you any promises,” she says. “I know that. And I don’t expect promises from you. Neither of us can help this being… difficult.” (She decides against _terrifying_ at the last minute.) “But I have another quotation for you,” says Lucy. “ ‘Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.’ William Shakespeare. It’s about love.” The person she loves most in all the world exhales sharply, his breath warm against her skin. 

Lucy raises his face in both her hands, kisses him on the brow, and on each of his closed eyes. “I don’t want to give birth during the school year,” says Lucy. “Or to be pregnant all summer.” Finally, she kisses him once more on the mouth. “Those are my conditions.”

He shudders: the tremor shakes his entire body. “Lucy,” says her lover at last; “Lucy, it isn’t — ” He breaks off, resumes: “Don’t feel that you _owe_ this — this or anything — ”

“No,” Lucy agrees. “No, that doesn’t come into it.” She feels the tension go out of his shoulders, and out of her own. For what seems a long time, they cling to each other, exhausted and tenacious as survivors of shipwreck.

“Get a room!” shouts a man from the other side of the path. Reflexively, Lucy glances round, annoyed; when she straightens, her partner is regarding her with a one-cornered smile.

“You know,” he says reflectively, “we could give him something to complain about.”

“You are a very wicked man,” declares Lucy Preston, “and I love you.”


	3. declaration

Lucy Preston leans back against the stonework of the History Corner, and allows herself to close her eyes briefly under the sunlight. It is, of course, irritating to have left behind the book she needs for her afternoon class. (What she gets for requiring the students to bring all the readings to every class, she supposes.) But it still feels a little bit like a luxury to have 15 minutes outside the office, away from the tenure dossier, the revise-and-resubmit article, the student emails, the relentlessly chirpy bean-counters.

“Hi,” says a familiar voice, deep and amused. _And, of course, away from people shooting at them across time._

Lucy opens her eyes, and grins up at him. “Hi.”

Flynn brings the book from behind his back with a flourish. _Absurd man_ , she thinks. “Seven Myths of Native American History.” His fingers drag over hers as he presses it into her hands. “Special delivery part of the service.”

“That’s nice.” She should let him go; she doesn't want to. “How’s preventing World War Three?”

“It’s postponed until next Tuesday at least.”

“That’s nice. And how are you?”

A familiar smile, the one that pulls at a corner of his mouth. “Just now? Rather feeling that every hour apart from you is wasted.”

“Mm,” says Lucy, “that’s nice.” She rolls her shoulders back, stretches so that she can twine her left foot around the back of his ankle. She watches him take a deep breath. 

“Lucy.”

She can’t resist smirking at him. “Yes?”

Garcia Flynn raises his eyes to the heavens. “A genius,” he says, “but a diabolical genius.”

“Thank you.”

“Well.” Briefly his tongue covers his lower lip. “I should,” he says, “get back to World War Three.”

“At least the cabal is letting you stay behind a desk for now.”

“Yes.” He draws breath, as if to say something else, but then merely makes her a strangely formal nod, and turns, and walks away.

Lucy watches him with no small feeling of satisfaction. It still feels strangely implausible, sometimes, that she should get to be here, doing the job she loves, watching the man she loves cross Stanford’s quad with loose-limbed grace. He might at least have kissed her, she thinks; and then, the next instant, realizes that of course he wouldn’t. End-of-year faculty parties are one thing. Kissing your ill-defined life partner in front of dozens of undergraduates, any of whom might be her students, would be quite another. Well. Let the students gossip as they may. (They do anyway; but she never shows him the course evaluations that speculate about her sexuality. Why tempt the man to violence?) 

Lucy Preston takes a deep breath. “Hey!” A few students glance up; he pivots as if drawn by a lodestone. She cups her hands around her mouth. “I love you!” The observers are quick to lose interest. But Garcia Flynn stands motionless, transfixed. And then, covering the ground in long strides, he starts back towards her.


	4. plural pasts

Lucy Preston runs her hands through her hair. “Garcia?”

“Hmm?” 

“The War of 1812 still _is_ the War of 1812, isn’t it?”

He looks up from the ball of dough he’s kneading. “If it isn’t, I think I may have gotten myself blown up in vain.”

“No,” says Lucy; “no, don’t mind me. It’s just that I hate time travel. And grading.” She finishes a marginal comment with a flourish and an emphatic full stop, and allows herself to collapse forward onto the kitchen island.

“What have your students invented now?” He deposits the dough in a bowl, washes his hands at the sink.

“Mmm.” Reflexively she leans to meet his touch, arching the nape of her neck under his ministrations. “This essay just puts the first half of the nineteenth century in a blender. It actually does matter when the Six Nations signed treaties. I sometimes wonder if I’ve gone into some sort of time-travel-induced fugue state and given them three timelines at once by mistake. But no! they just don’t pay attention!”

“Poor chick.”

“You know saying that makes you sound like a maiden aunt in an Agatha Christie novel.”

“It must translate badly.”

She laughs in spite of herself, swivels in her chair so that she can slump against him, burrow her face into the front of his sweater, breathe in his scent.

“I could always fact-check them for you,” he suggests to the crown of her head. “Save your genius for worthier efforts.”

“Mm, tempting. Or…” Lucy gets one hand under his sweater, allows her fingers to trace up his ribcage… “you could open a bottle of wine and I could pretend they don’t exist until tomorrow morning?”

He catches her roving hand and brings it to his lips, mischief dancing in his eyes. “How could I refuse?”

Lucy grins back at him. “With difficulty. I’m a very formidable personality.”

“Impressive is the word I’d use.”

Lucy hops down from her stool. “That’s nice.” She follows him around the kitchen, dices what she is told to dice and cuts herbs into ribbons and puts on a jazz record and insists that he dance with her while their dinner cooks. The bottle of wine is half-empty by the time the galette is finished, and they eat it from each other’s hands. 

“Put out the lights,” whispers Lucy against his lips; “leave the dishes.” Bing Crosby whistles on the stereo, the innuendo of the 1930s following them up the stairs.


	5. forest

“Hey,” says Lucy, a little bit breathlessly. “Can we — can we stop here for a minute?”

The alarm in his eyes is still quicker than anything else. But he relaxes as he turns to her; she can see the tension go out of his shoulders as he sees her whole, not limping, not hurt. Lucy stretches out her hand as he picks his way back to her, and he laces his fingers through hers. 

“Hey,” says Lucy again, and tilts her face up. He bends to kiss her on the lips, and she smiles.

“That what you wanted?” There is a rumble of amusement in his voice.

“Part of it.” She draws his arm around her. “I also just wanted… this.” There is too much mist for them to see into the valley; the sunlight on the redwoods is faint. But here, beneath the dripping trees, the entire world is green. “I wanted this,” repeats Lucy softly. It feels strange to say the words aloud; it feels too much like tempting fate. But the world is hushed and silent around them, the rain keeping less hardy walkers from the paths. The air is cool, and sweet and sharp with the scent of trees. Garcia puts his other arm around her, pulls her a little closer to him, and Lucy hums contentedly. The world is open to them, and they are free within it. There are no walls, and there is no danger.

“Lucy?”

“Yes?”

For answer, he kisses the top of her head. She has grown used to this; the gestures that say Oh, nothing, the gestures that say everything. 

Lucy settles herself against his chest. In a few moments they will move on, but for now his warmth keeps off the chill, and they are at peace. “Tell me words for green,” says Lucy.


	6. Monday

Lucy Preston gets home from choir practice, and gets the white wine out of the fridge.

“There’s leftover salad,” says her lover, loping in from the living room. “Or I could make you eggs, toast up some of yesterday’s bread.”

“Mm.” She crosses to him, leans her head against his chest.

“That bad?” he asks, after a minute during which she can feel tension slowly beginning to leach from her jaw, from her shoulders.

“Choir was good. It was the rest of the day…”

“Ah.”

“The interlibrary loan portal is down. And the survey course is freaking out about the midterm.”

“Ah,” says Flynn again.

“And the chair wants to talk to me about my proposed curriculum revisions. I just don’t think it should be a radical idea that our seniors should be required to read multiple authors in their theory course. And that the chief course text for the capstone shouldn’t be literally authored by a dead white man. It’s in its seventh edition.”

He takes her chin in his hand. “Hey.”

“Mm.” She tightens her arms around him, lets her hands slide to his belt. After some moments: “Kiss me again,” says Lucy.

“Shouldn’t you have dinner first?”

“Don’t tell me what to do, Garcia Fl—” This time, her hands find their way to his hair; when he lifts her to the kitchen island, her legs go around his waist.

“Yes,” says Lucy, rather breathlessly. “Yes.” She laughs, and buries her head against his shoulder. “But I should have dinner first.”

“Scrambled eggs,” he murmurs, into the shell of her ear. “Protein.” 

“Gotta keep my strength up,” she agrees. “Are you going to help me finish the bottle of wine?”

“Naturally.”

“Garcia,” says Lucy, as he is getting out the second glass, “have I told you lately that I love you?”

She cannot help thinking (as he turns to look at her, arrested with the bottle in his hand, suddenly motionless) that there is still something stricken in his gaze, something startled by love, still terribly afraid of its loss. “Garcia,” says Lucy again.

“Srećo moja.”

“Yes.” She hops down from the counter, takes the wine from his hands. “I’ll pour. You cook. And then we can go to bed. No alarums, no excursions. We’ll make love, and we’ll sleep, and you’ll make coffee in the morning, forever and ever amen.”

“I ja tebe volim,” says Garcia Flynn.


	7. hands

Lucy Preston lets her head drop forward onto her chest. Under Flynn’s hands, the tensions of carrying an overstuffed briefcase and library books to return and two packed meals and a coffee thermos begin to dissolve. The tensions of the tenure review may take longer to yield; but in this as in everything, he is thorough to the point of obstinacy. The phrase rises to her lips unbidden: _I have always loved your hands._ But she does not say it aloud. It would not be true, and she will not lie to him.

Once her lover’s hands were rough, and she was afraid. She was first aware of them as a bruising force, holding her out of danger, or pushing her out of his way. Only much later had it occurred to her that he might have seen these as the same thing. And she had fought him; they had fought each other. Looking back on that time, she is chiefly surprised that he was patient enough to persist, exhausted and resolute. She had seen the gentleness of his hands with their horses; and he had been so eager to take her relenting as a sign of the partnership he longed for. Lucy’s heart aches to think of it now, to think of their desperate and unhappy flight, his hand trembling on the gun, rigid at her wrist.

“Mm,” says Lucy; this is met with a gratified murmur. After their nadir, he had held back from touching her, but he had never unlearned gentleness. It is almost strange to her, now, to remember her own fear. She does recall, with perfect clarity, his hands on the leather-bound journal, reverent, relinquishing. She does not want to think about the handcuffs, his gestures fluid in defiance. He had fought for her — he had wrought violence at her word and in her defense — and then, as unquestioningly, reached for her with tenderness, and offered her a confidence she could barely claim for herself, and the touch of his hands was light.

Lucy thinks that it must have been in 1937, the first time that she thought of Flynn’s hands as beautiful. At her waist, above unbuttoned cuffs, relaxed on the steering wheel of the stolen car or on the table of the club… yes, it must have been then. Flynn’s hands, dwarfing a coffee cup, illustrating a point in discussion, becoming part of her life, shaping her expectations of the everyday. Flynn’s hands, light at her waist. And his hands, coming to hold her, to hold her up, to hold her together, the one steadying force in her world.

“All right?” asks Flynn softly.

“Yes.” She catches his hands in hers, and takes them to her lips. “I was just thinking,” says Lucy, lying back against him, “about your hands.”


	8. farewells

“You don’t have to — ”

“Garcia Flynn,” says Lucy, “for the last time, I’m coming to the airport.”

They don’t talk, at first, during the drive. She watches his hands on the wheel, long-fingered and capable. At last Flynn reaches for the stereo dial, steals a sidelong look at her, half a smile. And Lucy shakes her head at him, and swallows past the lump in her throat, and sings along. “ _Quand il me prend dans ses bras, il me parle tout bas, je vois la vie en rose. Il me dit des mots d’amour, des mots de tous les jours…_ ”

She keeps her arm hooked firmly through his in the baggage check line. Let them think her a cliché if they like, the well-groomed and uniformed attendants. She laces her fingers through his, when she can. At the gates, he pulls her into his arms.

“I don’t…” says Lucy into his leather jacket.

“What?” It occurs to her that she’s grown used to his kissing the top of her head like that, almost as a punctuation of their conversations. “What, Lucy?” 

She takes a deep breath; she tries not to think about how much she’ll miss the scent of him. She swallows. “I want to grow stupidly old with you.”

Flynn laughs — a startled breath — and some of the tension between her shoulder blades eases. “You could never grow stupidly old, srećo.”

“Oh.” She tightens her arms around him. “Not… it doesn’t mean that. I just… I want to see you go grey. I want to hear you grumble about your glasses prescription — yes, you would.” She rests her forehead against his sternum. “I want to raise kids with you,” she whispers. She feels, as well as hears, his intake of breath. "That is, if — ”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” says Lucy. “Okay. You just… just remember that, hm? While you're over there doing more-or-less translation?”

He clears his throat. “Yes,” he says, rather hoarsely. “Yes. Lucy…” She raises her head, and he tips her chin back to kiss her.

“Mm.” She laces her arms around his neck. “That’s a start,” she says, and he wraps his arms around her waist. “That’s more like it,” she murmurs into his neck. “Come home soon,” says Lucy, and she decides that she doesn’t care that she's crying. “Come home soon.”


	9. lunch

“Lucy,” says Elaine, scooping instant coffee crystals into a mug, “you know I respect you.”

Lucy glances sidelong at her colleague. “Ominous conversation opener, but yes, I do.” Her brow furrows. “What’s up?”

“Well… between you, me, and the department microwave, that’s what I wanted to ask you.”

“Because?”

Elaine sighs. “Because after David — good riddance to him, may all plagiarists of French dissertations meet such ends — canceled your tenure meeting, you took two years’ poorly explained research leave and came back with a partner in tow.”

“Ah,” says Lucy. The microwave beeps. She takes out her leftovers. “He makes me lunch.”

“Sure,” says Elaine, “but…”

“But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a statistical liability to my publishing schedule and my chances at promotion. And that he’ll be a bigger one when we have kids.”

“Well, yes… wait, _when_?”

Lucy smiles. “Yeah. And no, I’m not. But…” She sighs, stirs her stew, puts it back in the microwave. “You know about my track record.”

Elaine sips her coffee. “Noah would have bored you in five years. Maybe two.”

“Yeah. And on paper, he was perfect. Had his own high-powered career, wasn’t threatened, didn’t mind that I couldn’t cook.”

“The bar is so low.”

“Anyway,” says Lucy, “I know how it looks. Garcia and I never even dated properly. But I knew, long before I knew I was in love with him, that he trusted me implicitly. I knew that he saw all my weaknesses, and still admired me. And I knew he would risk his life and his soul to keep me safe, and never stop me from running into danger.”

Lucy takes out the lunch that her lover has made her; she holds its warmth in her hands. “How could I get rid of something,” she asks, “that felt oddly like grace?”


	10. Wer ein solches Weib errungen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: this chapter involves an on-campus active shooter incident. There is no explicit violence.

“The Leonore overture No. 3,” says the radio announcer, “Beethoven’s paean to conjugal love, there in a performance from the Berlin Philharmonic under Von Karajan.” Flynn lets the water out of the sink, and turns to drying the wine glasses. “And now over to the news.” 

“In breaking news,” says a woman in the sober tones reserved for still-uncertain tragedy, “Stanford University is on lockdown after a reported shooting…” The glass shatters. “…Police have as yet made no arrest.”

He is afraid to move. The shards and fragments of glass around his feet have nothing to do with this. If he moves, if he so much as breathes, he will give time permission to continue. And he is far from sure that he is prepared to do that.

The decision is taken out of his hands: on the kitchen island, his phone starts buzzing. Flynn curses under his breath. He is very aware of his own heartbeat. He picks up the phone. Of course, the texts are not from her. In the Time Team thread, Rufus has written: _Saw news on Twitter — update when you can??_ To Flynn, he has written: _U need me to hack anything? get info?_ Flynn hesitates, then replies to the latter: _Thanks. I’m headed there now._ He breathes. He is lightheaded with oxygen, with the consciousness of time. And then he sees her notification.

He gets out of the kitchen as fast as he can. He leaves the glass; it does not seem to matter very much. He laces his shoes and fastens his bicycle helmet with trembling hands. He will not erase the message that he has one missed call, one new voicemail. If… Whatever has happened (is happening, will happen), he needs to be close to her. 

Flynn is honked at more than once, as he speeds around corners, pedals with a fury that insists on his right of way. He cannot, he will not delay. Of course, there is nothing for him to do when he gets there. He has switched from repetitive cursing to desperate prayer. He thinks he might have left a bit out of the Our Father. There is always the simplest prayer of all: have mercy upon me, a sinner. It encapsulates everything: yes, this is more than justice; no, I do not deserve it; please. It feels strange, already-dangerous to be asking, when it has always been Lucy who has brought him mercy. Long ago Flynn stopped bothering to wonder whether it was on God’s behalf or her own. But now… now, he begs.

He is surrounded by weeping students, stern police, waiting ambulances. He knows he could get past the security lines. He could probably do it without them noticing, at first. And he’d probably get himself shot for his pains. And there would be no way of finding her, no way of making her safe. His bones and blood still ache to do so. In his pocket, his phone buzzes.

Rufus: _No mention Rittenhouse police comms._

Flynn lets out a breath before replying. _Thanks. Don’t get arrested_.

He paces, the noises of helicopters and walkie-talkies and the distressed, uncertain crowds a distant cacophony, muffled by nearer birdsong, by his own rapid pulse. Finally he gives in. He acknowledges that he has seen the missed call. (She’ll be locked in. She’ll be in a lecture hall, or her office, or a closet. She’ll hate it.) He takes a breath. He presses play.

 _Hi, it’s me! I don’t need anything, I just…_ A puff of breath, and (he imagines) her fingers raked through her hair. _I think my students have forgotten how to be students over the weekend. I haven’t looked for party hashtags; I don’t want to know. We were talking about transgressive spaces in the early republic today — how can they not find that interesting?_ He tries not to expect the sound of gunshots. _I mean_ , says Lucy, _it’s spies. Speaking of which, I should let you get back to translating for the cabal. Which is probably what you’re doing. Pour me wine tonight,_ says Lucy, her syllables drawling into indecency. _Tell me I’m brilliant, hmm? Love you, genius. Are we doing Russian or French today? Ya lyublyu tebya. Je t’aime. Okay. Love you. Bye._

Flynn sits down on the pavement. He puts his head in his arms. He begs.

“Sir,” says a voice, “sir, you can’t be here.” He looks up. He calculates how long it would take him to have this man on his back. “Sir,” says the man, uneasy in his ill-fitting uniform, “we’re going to need this for an evacuation route; you can’t be here.”

Flynn stands up, and he does not stagger in standing. The tone of the crowd has changed; it is expectant; Flynn knows how easily it could change to hysteria. They have seen no arrest. They have seen no blood. They might yet. He stands still, making himself immovable, making himself impassive, a thing not to be drawn into the embraces, the anxiety, the fear. 

There have been no audible gunshots since his arrival; he knows too much to find this consoling. Ambulances have gone; if she were on one of them, he would have gotten word. But if ( _if, if, if_ …) He cannot bring himself to complete the thought. It fractures into images: Lucy’s face, and her blood. Lucy’s face, and her blood.

The evacuees come shuffling. They come huddled, and silent, and clinging to each other. It is the group on the other side of the barrier that cries, and fills the air with the sound effects of sent messages, and breathes half-profane prayers. Flynn is silent. 

He had imagined — he had allowed himself to imagine — shouting her name. He has been calling for her since before they were allies. He has called out to her across history. And now he cannot speak. She is pale, and she is barefoot, and she is (oh merciful God) alive. She has wept, but she is now composed. She has an arm around a student’s shoulders, and her battered briefcase in her other hand. Flynn breathes. 

She is almost at the barrier when she sees him. He sees her lips part; he sees her soundless intake of breath. Obediently she follows in the semi-orderly procession, gives her name at the checkpoint. Only briefly does she take her eyes off him, speaking to the woman with the clipboard, reassuring her student. And when she is through, and free, Lucy starts to run. She stumbles a little on the asphalt, but she runs. He steps forward — a little unsteady, now — and opens his arms to her.

“I love you,” says Lucy into his ear. “I love you, I love you.” 

“ _Ya lyublyu tebya vsem serdtsem._ ” He is overwhelmed by the scent of her hair. “You’re not hurt?”

“No,” says Lucy. “No, I — it wasn’t — we weren’t hurt.” A few tears soak into the fabric of his collar, and he tightens his arms around her. “I might just… cry on you anyway.”

“That’s fine,” says Flynn. “That’s fine, that’s… _tout ira bien_.” She shivers, and relaxes against him. “ _Voilà, c'est ça._ ”

“Can we…” says Lucy after a few minutes; she is still clinging to him. “Can we go home now?”

Flynn presses a kiss to her temple. “Yes,” he says. “Yes.”


	11. travel

Dr. Lucy Preston kicks off her shoes under the café table, pushes the conference program away from her. She rolls out her shoulders. The linden tree in the corner of the courtyard rustles in the breeze from which they themselves are sheltered; the autumn sunlight is gentle. She stretches out one stockinged foot, nudges against her partner’s calf.

“Hey.” She picks up her wine glass.

“Mm.” He is sitting with his head tilted back, his eyes closed. Lucy smiles.

“I’ve wanted to see you like this.”

Garcia Flynn opens one eye at her. “Drinking German wine in the middle of the afternoon?”

Lucy makes a face at him, and swings her ankles over his thigh. “Relaxed.”

“Ah.” Almost idly his thumb traces patterns against the arch of her foot. “I’m not that bad, am I?”

Her eyes sting, and Lucy finds that she has to swallow before replying. “No,” she says. “No, darling, you're not.”

He chuckles. "You're a terrible liar, Lucy Preston.”

“Yeah.” She drinks the last of her wine a little faster than it deserves. "Always have been.”

“Mm. Well.” Flynn sighs, and gently releases her feet. Contemplatively he considers the level in the wine bottle before dividing the remainder between them. “You could always try to reform me.”

Lucy laughs (she reflects that it is not fair, that he should always be able to make her laugh.) “Garcia Flynn! I wouldn't dare.”

He hums thoughtfully. “It might not be such a demanding project. The Rhine is three minutes’ walk that way.”

“Are you suggesting that I throw you in? Like Schiller?”

“It was Schumann.”

“Show off.”

“Sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” Lucy sips her Riesling. “Do you think the proprietor would be scandalized if I sat in your lap?”

“Probably.”

“Mm.” She pouts (only half-feigned) and thoughtfully Flynn meets her gaze, his eyes dark. She has come to read him well; her own pulse quickens when he moistens his lips. Lucy looks away; she counts the windows of the nineteenth-century facade. “Well,” she says, “I suppose that's just as well. If I'm trying to reform you.”

He smiles, raises her knuckles briefly to his lips. “I’m already yours entirely.” He picks up his wine glass. “And you know it.”

“I…” Lucy swallows. She takes a deep breath. He is still at his ease, shoulders relaxed against his chair. For him this is a statement of fact, too obvious to be momentous. “I…” says Lucy again.

Flynn finishes his glass of wine, and gets to his feet, pulling her up after him. “And if you have forgotten,” he says, “I shall have to remind you. Come, _Liebste_.” And Lucy goes — lightheaded, astonished at her own happiness.


	12. past, future

Mercifully, some of their worst memories are — like so much else — lost to the past. Carol Preston’s death might recur in nightmares, but Flynn is grimly glad that it has no anniversary. Chinatown left them all with too many scars as it is. Carol Preston’s birthday, however, is another story.

The first year, he hadn’t realized until Lucy burst into tears at the dinner table. He had only been worried that she might be sickening for something; she was quieter than usual, and picking at her dinner. And then she was sobbing as helplessly as a child, and he almost knocked both their bowls off the table in his haste to gather her into his arms.

This year, they are painting the living room. She had suggested it the previous week, when they were sitting in front of Shanghai Express and the remnants of a homemade pizza. “I think we should repaint that wall.” His legs were stretched lazily out in front of him, her head in his lap.

“Oh? Do funding application deadlines often inspire you to undertake home improvement projects?” Unusually, she barely seemed to register the lightly teasing question.

“I think it’s too beige.” He hummed meditatively, considering this. “I was thinking burgundy,” continued Lucy.

“I’m not sure I’m qualified to offer an opinion. Strong contrast color?”

“You have the jargon down. If we’re lucky, the weather next weekend will be nice enough to have the windows open.” And then he had understood, and had spent the better part of an afternoon discussing paint finishes with a watery-eyed man who appeared to be trying not to look actively terrified.

And now, furniture out of the way, Lucy applying a delicate brush to the edge of the baseboard, and Flynn on a stepladder, they are painting the wall. The color is officially called Cabernet Sunset; Flynn tries not to hold this against it. Every so often, he consciously forces himself to release tension from his jaw, to avoid glowering at his paint roller. But he cannot stop himself from wondering what kind of woman could look at Lucy Preston and see only a creature to be molded, a tool to be used.

“Garcia,” says Lucy in a small voice.

“Yes, srećo?”

“Why… why me?” 

He looks over at her. Her eyes are bright with unshed tears, there is a smear of paint over her right cheekbone, and he loves her so much that it stops his breath. “Why what, Lucy?”

She puts down her paintbrush, plaits her fingers together. “What made you believe in me? I know,” she adds, in a rush; “I know, I’ve never asked, and maybe we shouldn’t talk about it in case I do have to go back to São Paulo but… Why me? Why follow me through time and space? And why…?” She is shaking, now, with the effort not to cry. Moving with deliberate care, he descends the ladder. “Why are you willing to live with me in my mother’s house?”

Flynn sighs deeply. Kneeling beside her, he takes both her hands in his. Somewhat to his surprise, she lets herself be drawn against him, shaking with the tears she sheds and with those she can’t. “Lucy,” he says. He is quite sure that he has no words for this grief. “Lucy.” He may be getting paint in her hair, stroking it, but at the moment that is only a distant concern. “It is not only I,” he says at last, “who sees the strength of your courage, and the worth of your heart.” Her fists are buried in his shirtfront, clutching with a child’s desperation.

“I could love you forever and it wouldn’t be enough.” She hiccups a little in shock. “We could repaint every wall in the house, or move out taking only what we could carry. ‘Whither thou goest…’ And — Lucy — you can craft a life for yourself infinitely more precious than anything your mother could imagine.” She is quiet in his arms, her breath still coming unevenly. He wonders if he has said enough, or too much. “Lucy,” he begins; and she leans up and kisses him.


	13. midnight alarums

Lucy is woken from uneasy slumbers without at first realizing why. Then she realizes that the other half of the bed is empty. She makes a displeased noise into the pillow. When this fails to produce any signs of life from the direction of the bathroom, she takes stock. Groping into the darkness reveals that the sheets are cold where he has left them. Shivering, she fumbles into her slippers and heads downstairs.

She finds him on the kitchen floor. Lucy Preston sighs. Briefly she allows herself to wonder what their shared life might have been like in another and a gentler timeline.

“’M fine,” says Flynn, as she wakes him.

“Yes, dear,” says Lucy, helping him to sit up. “But you are also running a temperature. And… on the kitchen floor curled up around a Pyrex dish?”

“I…” She strokes his hair; he regards the 4-cup measuring cup with an expression of intense concentration. “I needed water and I thought… I wouldn’t have to come down again…”

“Ah,” says Lucy. She presses a kiss to his temple. “Very sensible.” She picks up the measuring cup in one hand, puts her other arm around his waist. “But if you’re in danger of fainting — ” he staggers slightly as they stand up — “you could always tell me. Come on. Couch.” She has no desire to try her luck by maneuvering them both up the stairs. She lets him collapse onto the sofa first, then pulls down the afghan he bought her to cover them both.

He is still shivering, behind her. And both his temperature and his docility she finds fairly alarming. Nevertheless: there is something almost nostalgic in the familiarity of bunking together in a slightly too-small space, huddled together for warmth, for protection, for comfort.

“Lucy?” says Garcia Flynn.

“Yes,” she says, and reaches for his hand. “Yes.”


	14. notes

Flynn wakes with his heart racing, and at first, he’s not sure why. _Something_ must be wrong, but, listening, he is sure that no noise has roused him. And then he remembers. Lucy slipping out of bed before dawn, her hand gentle against his face. _It’s all right; I’m going to teach; I love you_. Before that, Lucy in his arms, her legs around him like the flukes of an anchor. And before that, the dreams. Flynn runs a hand over his face. They haven’t been that bad since… well, he doesn’t want to dwell on that. Still he can feel the fear, pulsing under his skin: the fear of losing Lucy, the fear of losing Lucy _and_ … He can still see the image in his mind, her blood on their bedclothes, her blood on his hands.

Flynn forces himself to breathe, and get up; he forces his knees not to buckle when he stands. He brushes his teeth without looking in the mirror; he has no desire to see what he looks like this morning. When, finally, he does raise his head, he finds in his own eyes chiefly surprise. And below them, a bright blue PostIt note. _Volim te._ Flynn releases the breath he’s been holding. He reaches out to run his fingers over the long-familiar lines of his lover’s handwriting. Decidedly, he does not deserve this woman.

The shower helps. But dread still sits in his gut; his hands still shake. He gives up on buttoning his shirt with a growl, tears it off, only at the last minute manages not to throw it petulantly onto the floor of the closet. She shouldn’t see the evidence of this. When he opens the drawer devoted to his sweaters, he finds, stuck to the front of his burgundy turtleneck — had it been on top of the pile yesterday? — a second note. _Je t’aime._ Sometimes, Flynn suspects that Lucy knows him better than he knows himself. At other times he is convinced of it.

He goes downstairs, and forces himself to breathe. She’s fine. She’ll be fine. He still feels hollowed out, as though he is empty of all but fear. The third note is on the coffee pot. _Ich liebe dich. Also, I love you._ The noise that escapes him is dangerously close to a sob. He tears the note off the pot, and the paper trembles in his hand, as he clutches it like a talisman. Flynn breathes.


	15. Homecoming

Lucy Preston is very glad to be home. Another week of the quarter down, not that she’s counting (she’s counting.) And ditto, just about, to another week of her second trimester. She’s definitely counting; even if she weren’t, she thinks, her body would keep track for her. Each week, almost, seems to bring new symptoms. At least she’s only lost her balance and stumbled into the blackboard once so far. And at least that’s almost something she might have done anyway.

She deposits her briefcase, kicks off her shoes, and shuffles her slippers on. “Home!” It’s long since become a ritual. Still, it gives her a thrill that surprises her a little, a slight fluttering under the breastbone, to know that it matters to someone else — to him — that she’s home and safe. That Flynn doesn’t answer is no cause for alarm. He’s probably upstairs, translating Russian, or Arabic, or French. Lucy puts on the tea kettle. If he’s not translating for the cabal, he’ll be testing paint swatches for the room she’s trying to think of as the nursery.

Lucy pours the water over her teabag, inhales the aroma of the ginger. She’s glad they’re having a girl; she’s glad it can still be Amy’s bedroom. It still almost chokes her sometimes, the giddy knowledge that they’re doing this, she and Flynn, building a future on all the pieces of their pasts. It takes Lucy several minutes to realize what she’s staring at, oddly abandoned on the kitchen island. For one thing, Flynn defaults to a soldier’s tidiness. For another, he’s been very sweet about joining her in enforced temperance. So the corkscrew — still open, still with a slightly torn cork impaled — is odd. Lucy tries not to let it frighten her. She consciously deepens her breaths (out, and in, and out) as she finishes preparing her tea. The wine bottle is nowhere to be seen.

She finds it and Flynn both in the living room. “Hey.” It comes out more breathless than she expects it to.

“Hi.” He is absolutely motionless; he does not even turn his head.

Lucy swallows. She assesses the level of wine in the bottle. “Are you…” No, _okay_ would be a mockery. “Are you… drunk?” Lucy winces. That might be even worse than _okay_.

“No.” His voice is low and dangerous, anger in it like a current under ice. “English has many good words for…” With one hand he gestures towards the wine bottle, the near-empty glass. “And I am not yet drunk.” His tongue curls around the word, contemptuous.

Lucy puts her hand on the back of the sofa — his first warning, his first intimation — and carefully settles herself into it. “Okay.” She leans her head back, settles deliberately against his arm (rigid, corded with tension.) “Colonial and Revolutionary America went well today.” He makes a noise in his throat. Lucy finds herself wishing he’d curse in five languages instead.

“Hey,” says Lucy softly. “We’re fine. I’m fine.”

With his free left hand he takes hers, raises it to his lips. He doesn’t kiss it. He breathes against her knuckles, her fingertips. He rests his forehead against her palm, and Lucy blinks back tears, intensely aware of the feverish heat of his skin, the rapid pulse of the vein at his temple.

“We’re fine,” says Lucy again, a little helplessly. “You saw, on the scan yesterday: she’s healthy, it’s — oh.” She’s filled with the sudden and incandescent desire to murder the ultrasound technician. Lucy Preston reflects dispassionately that she should, perhaps, be alarmed by this homicidal capacity. But she left nice behind a long time ago, and she doesn’t really miss it. She’d barely registered the remark. ( _We’ll have to hope she’s not big-boned like her father, right_?) It was so unimportant. It was background noise, chit-chat; they saw hundreds of couples, thousands in a year, and they said trite things and stupid things and Lucy didn’t care. Not with her hand gripping Flynn’s and a strange, almost surreal image filling the screen, filling their world.

“Garcia.” 

“Yes.” 

“I love you.”

She watches his jaw work; she watches him swallow. He releases her hand. “And I you.”

“Mm. Move over.” He is still almost vibrating with tension, but she settles herself in his lap, pulls his arms around her. “There.” Wordlessly he draws her closer, changes his position so that she can lie in his arms. “Mm,” says Lucy, burying her head against his chest. “That’s nice.”

“Lucy,” he says, and stops. She wonders sometimes if he grew unused to words, during those two bleak years when he was chasing hers in a journal.

“I love this,” she says softly, and she means it. Even with his heartbeat too fast underneath her, even with unshed tears in his voice. “I love this. Intellectual history on Mondays, queer history in the US Tuesday-Thursday, colonial America Wednesday-Friday.” She tilts her head up to kiss his chin. “And you.” Again she becomes conscious of the pricking of tears behind her eyes; from where she is lying, she can see the wall that they painted together last year, the matching bookcases that she came home from a conference to find flanking the fireplace.

“This,” says Lucy Preston, “is more than I ever thought was possible. I — I tried to believe I could be a good historian in my own right, and I told myself that I could have kids someday, that it might happen, but…” She guides his hand under the hem of her tunic. She feels him shudder. “I never dared to want this,” she whispers. “Not really. Wishing… wishing for more than I ever knew. That’s all it was. And now…”

“Lucy.” She can feel his quickened breath. “Lucy, you have given me — ” another pause, a kiss pressed to the top of her head — “my life. Several times. As you know.” She laughs, at that; a few tears fall, are absorbed into his shirt. “I know,” he says, “that we cannot live a life without danger. But I cannot — I cannot — ”

Lucy reaches behind her, gets a hand firmly anchored in his hair. “Shh.”

He swallows. “I hate,” he says, “the knowledge that I am endangering you.”

“You’re not endangering me,” she counters quickly. “Garcia, you’re not. You are, at my request, snuggling me on the couch.”

“ _Snuggling_.”

“An excellent English word, I’ll have you know. You are snuggling me on the couch,” repeats Lucy Preston, with emphasis, “and we, together, are doing something dangerous and a little bit terrifying and absolutely amazing. But that… that just counts as normal in our relationship, right?”

Flynn presses another kiss to the top of her head, inhales deeply. “Moja najdražo. I don’t deserve you.”

“Pots,” says Lucy firmly. “Kettles.” She stretches, rolling her hips, arching her back. “I could… give you things to do.”

“Mm?”

“Mmhmm.” She takes his hand in hers, guides it lower. There are, she has been discovering, many advantages to elastic waistbands. “You could — _ah_ — make passionate love to me and then — yes — you could make that broccoli-anchovy thing again.” He sits up, pulling her against him. Lucy wonders briefly if it would be indelicate to observe, at her next sonogram appointment, that there are distinct advantages to being considerably smaller than one’s lover.

“Lucy,” says Garcia Flynn. “Lucy, my love, my heart.” Her shirt lands on top of the wine glass. “You have very, ah, specific ideas.”

“I do,” she says happily, and hooks her feet around his calves, leans back to kiss along the line of his jaw. “’S what happens when you have more than you’ve ever wanted. Anchovies on pasta become the height of your worldly desires.”

“Mm.” He raises his mouth from the base of her nape. “I see.” Lucy gasps a little as he brings his hands to cup her breasts. “But this first?”

Lucy leans back into her lover’s arms, where she has always been safe. “Oh yes,” she says. “This first.”


	16. tattoo

“Are you sure about this?”

Lucy Preston leans into her lover’s side before pushing open the door of the tattoo parlor. “For the last time, Garcia Flynn, yes.”

They’ve known this was coming, of course, for a long time. Two weeks before she is due to depart for São Paolo five years earlier, she tells him: “I want a tattoo.”

He turns his head on the pillow to look at her. “You’ve never seemed like the type.”

“No,” agrees Lucy. “But I want one now, before… before I go.”

His hand finds hers under the sheets. “Can I ask why?”

She turns over, drapes herself over him. “You can always ask why.” She kisses him. “Yes. Yes, of course. I need a tattoo,” she says, “so that if the worst happens, if I forget…”

“Lucy…”

“I need to find my way back to you,” she says. “Whatever happens in our new version of time… I need, I want…”

“Yes,” he says simply. “Yes.”

He has written both names out for the artist: _Garcia Mihajlo Flynn. Amy Maria Preston-Flynn._ Beneath these, in the same angular script, are the coordinates of a Craftsman house with battered chairs on the porch, two bicycles and a tricycle pulled up under the carport, lilacs spilling into the front yard.

“You could just take the piece of paper,” he points out.

She laughs. “Garcia Flynn, I didn’t know you were like this about needles. Anyway, I want this. It’s safer. And if something happens, if we don’t have Amy, if we don’t… if you don’t…” Lucy Preston takes a deep breath. “I want this,” she says again. “Historical record,” she adds, and tries to smile, and tries not to cry. “Your words on my body, your hand on my body. I want this,” she says.


End file.
